Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott
by . New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe. 1920. 12mo, viii-+-451 + pp. $2.00.
THERE is no reason in artistic economy why anyone should ever write another novel of contemporary life in a small country town of These States, or why, if anyone does write such another novel, a reader of Main Street should read it. ‘Ever’ is, of course, a long word: let us rather say that there is no reason why either of these things should happen until the small towns of These States have evolved the rudiments of a civilization. For in the four hundred and fifty pages of this book the American small town as it now exists is done, with a mighty, an exhaustive and definitive doing. There is simply nothing more that can be observed and written down about it — about its provincial narrowness, its materialism, its malice, its servility, its smugegotism, its childish curiosity, its blind cruelty, and, on the other side of the ledger, its basic goodness of heart, its tenacity of character, its dogged and snail-like progress along the path of self-improvement.
Mr. Lewis has done his Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, with a realism more intensive, impossible as that would seem, than Mr. Arnold Bennett’s in Clayhanger. Nor is this because he deals with one town only, as against Mr. Bennett’s five: it is because Mr. Lewis has made himself the more inexorable realist. Gopher Prairie is every small town in North America, and ’its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere.’ The art of the fictional copyist can no further go, in either depiction or — and this is the miracle representation. Main Street will be to you, according to the æsthetic creed you profess, a triumph of realistic synthesis or the reductio ad absurdum of realism. Perhaps it ought to be called both; perhaps it is the first because it is the second. In any event, it gives you, as does The Old Wives’ Tale, the sense of its being greater than the realistic creed which made it. Certainly there will be no one to challenge its purely artistic integrity.
Its artistic integrity, though, is hardly the point. The book itself is a challenge — first, to the whole sprawling and inchoate mass of life which is the sum of all the Gopher Prairies; then, and not less significantly, to the shallow cosmopolitan æstheticism that expects to reform and beautify the Gopher Prairies from without by transplanting into them an alien and city-bred culture, which, being not of their soil, can take no root therein. For Mr. Lewis seems to have faith that our Gopher Prairies shall be saved at the last, and self-saved. He is the mordant, almost vindictive satirist of their present; but he is at the same time the confident spokesman of their future.
In a book about such a composite reality, there must be an individual for protagonist against the huge, blind, cramping, inescapable impersonal force. Mr. Lewis’s individual is the Carol Kennicott of his sub-title. She, a young university graduate and ex-librarian, marries a country physician of Gopher Prairie and takes up her life in the little town, sustained by self-flattering visions of how she is going to enlighten and uplift it. She is a vivid enough example of the immature, effervescent, easily discouraged idealist, and her personal history is com pound of truth and pathos. But the ultimate unimportance of the exceptional person is shown by the fact that she, the enlightened, superior individualist from whose angle we view the scene and the struggle, seems in retrospect a mere unmemorable wraith by comparison with her husband, who, in his stupidity, his good-natured vulgarity, and his capacity for killing himself with drudgery and counting it all in the day’s work, is the small town incarnate — a monumental definition of both its present spiritual inertia and its future potentialities.
H. T. F.